Fallout Shelter is now available on Android

Fallout Shelter

Today is August 13, and if you've been paying attention you'll know that means that Fallout Shelter, Bethesda's free-to-play Vault-Tec management game, is now available for Android. It's also been updated rather substantially, with new additions including dangerous Raiders and the handy Mr. Handy as a premium reward.

Mobile games aren't really our thing around here, but Fallout most definitely is, and since we mentioned a few weeks ago that the Android version of Fallout Shelter was coming, I figured that a little bit of noise about the actual release would be appropriate. As promised, the update also brings Deathclaws and Mole Rats to the game, exposes your vault dwellers to the dangers of Raiders, tweaks the vault population growth rate, and makes various other changes and fixes.

Mr. Handy may be the most useful addition of them all—the Bethesda Blog describes it as a "friendly, entertaining alternative to tapping and collecting resources." Each Mr. Handy is a "premium reward," with an in-app purchase price of $1, according to Touch Arcade, or $4 for five.

You'll need more than that to beat the high score, though: As Polygon points out, someone named Jake Poile has already hacked the game to give himself a score of two billion points. Second place? Bytesize TestUser, with a little under 16,000.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.